Let me entertain you

Savage reviews, endless rain, tiny audiences: as an actor, Annie Griffin took everything the Edinburgh Fringe could throw at her and came back for more. Now she has captured the whole addictive experience on film

Let me entertain you

Savage reviews, endless rain, tiny audiences: as an actor, Annie Griffin took everything the Edinburgh Fringe could throw at her and came back for more. Now she has captured the whole addictive experience on film

Friday 8 July 2005 07.09 EDT
First published on Friday 8 July 2005 07.09 EDT

For as long as there has been an Edinburgh Festival, there has been a Fringe. As soon as the official Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama started in 1947, there were actors who decided to show up, unofficially, to put on a show. That's the nature of performers - we don't need to be asked. If there's going to be an audience, we're there. It's one way of looking at the Fringe - a forum for the uninvited. It's a place for people who will perform no matter what.

For an actor, the Edinburgh Fringe experience has remained pretty consistent over the decades. You arrive in Edinburgh and realise you've brought all the wrong clothes for a city that can be as wet and windy in summer as most countries are in winter. The venue hasn't put up your posters, and the technician has lost your lighting plot. The flat you've rented is miles from the venue. You leaflet all day on the High Street. It rains. That first week, you have audiences of four and five, and one of them sits in the front row, writing in a notebook. Is he the Scotsman reviewer? Might you be chosen for Pick of the Day? You spend hours in the pub after every show, dissecting your performance with actors equally eager to talk about themselves. You soon acquire that particular Edinburgh pallor of makeup residue and ill health. Is it sunny today? Who cares? I got a bad review in the List. Bastards.

The British theatre scene is full of emigre actors such as myself who came for a little visit and stayed. This is because no other country has the equivalent of the Fringe, a place for actors to inflict their talent on a willing public. This is theatre outside the mainstream institutions where you audition for a bored director, and wait by the phone for a callback. It's more like theatre used to be, where performers decide to put on a show, and then do it.

For most of the 1980s, I would debut a show in Edinburgh, then tour to small venues around the regions, followed by a fortnight at a Fringe venue in London. The Fringe is more than Edinburgh - it's all those regional and metropolitan arts centres, and the companies who tour them. But the Fringe began in Edinburgh. One gig at the Edinburgh Fringe could turn a dilettante performer into a committed professional. It gave you the idea that there was an audience out there who wanted to watch you act.

My first Edinburgh Fringe was in 1981. I was with a group of students presenting a repertory of shows. Our venue was in a courtyard off the High Street, better known as the Royal Mile. The Royal Mile! Old Town! Oh, the thrill of it - all those steep narrow steps with weird names such as Fleshmarket Close - how atmospheric! I saw locals spit on the Heart of Midlothian in the pavement by St Giles Cathedral, where prisoners were once executed. There's a well by the castle that marks the spot where James VI burned witches. No wonder the neighbourhood was said to be full of ghosts. On the corner of Bank Street, I stood transfixed by the statue of David Hume, whose essays I'd just studied back in America. Wow - the prophet of enlightened self-interest had walked on these cobblestones! Robert Burns had been here looking for a publisher! Boswell had introduced his pals here to the Londoner Samuel Johnson! Sean Connery had delivered milk here! Gosh! All my thoughts had exclamation marks.

We acted all day, and when there was a break, we went outside to leaflet, or drink pints of heavy at Deacon Brodie's Tavern (named after the resident who inspired Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). I learned about the legendary shows of the Fringe. Tadeusz Kantor had brought The Dead Class over from Poland the year before and everyone was still talking about it. Over in the Meadows, there was a company called Lumiere and Son doing a modern version of circus that was so cool you couldn't get a ticket. There was barely any comedy. All that came later. The place was the world Mecca of theatre.

Our group's sell-out main show was a Brechtian production of Measure for Measure. I had the non-starring role of Whore/ Nun, but in true Brechtian style the whole cast was on stage all evening. We sat on boxes at the back, in costume and in character, reacting to the story line. We were an ensemble. The Fringe First award would belong to all of us. Except we didn't get one. It didn't matter. We had a boisterous wrap party and trashed the flat on Barony Street in the New Town badly enough to lose our deposit. I decided I wasn't going back to Buffalo.

There were more Edinburgh Fringes for me through the 1980s, doing one-woman shows at the old Traverse theatre on Grassmarket. With just one of me, there was a lot less fuss. No one but the technician could rehash the show with me in the pub afterwards. By then, the comedians were starting to get all the attention. I began to have doubts about being an actor. Did any of it matter? In a hundred years' time, or even 20, would anyone remember any of it?

Theatre is just so transitory. As Peter Brook said in the Guardian last month: "It's passionately exciting for a moment, and then it goes." That's the beauty of it; but for struggling performers, the ephemeral nature of theatre also brings the feeling of having nothing to show for all those shows. Where do old actors go when the audiences dry up? How do we remember them when they die, the actors never quite famous enough to make the obituary pages? What was the point of all of that?

But you can never really leave one era of your life behind. The past keeps turning up, uninvited, as subject matter. Three years ago during the festival, rushing up the High Street to get to a movie on Lothian Road, I was watching the street performers, the crowds, the annual mayhem. Memories came back of the shows, the longing for things to go well, the intense friendships and rivalries of festival time. I started to think about Festival, the movie. So last year it was back on the streets of Edinburgh, not to perform but to film. For weeks we shot our actors in the midst of the crowds. Surprisingly, no one took much interest in a small film crew. There was so much else going on. The shoot lasted beyond the festival, into September and October as we shot our interiors. Edinburgh is so different after August. The residents return and the city is full of people getting on with their lives. None of them, from what I could tell, was thinking about the last show they'd seen.

They still talk of ghosts in the Old Town. You can even take a Ghost Tour, and wait for a phantom from the past to creep up on you. Maybe the ghosts these days aren't the miserable witches and plague victims from the 17th century. Maybe they're the Fringe performers who won't be forgotten, the uninvited festival guests who just want you to take a leaflet. Can you feel them? They're just beyond the corner of your eye, their breath on the back of your neck, just dying for you to come and see their show ...